We had a previous investment in an online consumer products retailer. One issue that we were facing in rebuilding (unfortunately) the site’s backend from the bottom-up was re-branding the product line into several market segments that we were going to market through distinct URLs, designs, and strategies. My goal was to do all of that using a single back-end database (since products would fall into more than one segment) and ecommerce platform (since everything would be ordered, stored, and shipped from the same location). We never quite got to the point of finding the right solution; perhaps foolishly, I expected that this was not the first incarnation of the problem and that some boxed solution had all these capabilities.

Under the circumstances, the bounty is $50 for a pointer to a quality program that accomplishes these tasks and a TBD bounty if the response is an offer to build/license the package.

Part I of the project, which I won’t really define in detail, is a combination web front-end and back-end [ERP/ecommerce] software package that meets the general description above. We would like the system to be easily extensible to running additional unrelated sites (i.e., we really want a platform rather than just an application. My current guess on how this might work is that it will be a mySQL-compatible database “layer” that will update with the ERP/ecommerce layers every 10 or 15 minutes, and all the website generation will come out of the database layer.

Part II of the project is a tool that makes it easier to classify a variety of products according to various categories relevant to the database.

The interaction results in classification and organization of products in the inventory. The products need to be classified under different dimensions with option of additional filters/labels/tags. To do this, the system needs to allow a customer sales representative (CSR) to set the classification for the products, preferably in a visual, checkbox/radio button format, enabling matching of descriptions to photo images of the product. After a product is classified the page can display the next product to be classified. The system will also allow the CSR to reclassify the product at any time.

To ease the process, it would be helpful to have an option to classify two products simultaneously. The selection of the two products presented for the choice should be random, with some modest preference for those not yet classified. When there are multiple classifications/selections/choices to be made, the alternatives should all be presented on the same page with the same photos.

Finally, we would like to consider evaluating different/alternate photos for each product to get an opinion of preference. This is similar to an internal version of the A/B test protocol (which, needless to say, should be part of the underlying ecommerce system).

Questions and answers from previous discussions:

Will the classification be hierarchical and if hierarchical to how many levels? — the primary classification is one of forced choice between two products, choosing which is more appropriate for some classification, such as which of these two products is more appropriate for a man or woman. The other classification tasks are really more like editing product details, and so they don’t really have the forced choice component.

Do the CSRs need any login page? — the login page should be part of the pre-existing security for the database, so this is not part of this specific project. Also, we would like to eventually make this classifying/rating task available to customers, tracked, analyzed, and presented separately.

Do you also need to know who did the classification for a product? — No, this is not important for the CSRs. If we undertake the customer implementation, we would probably consider tracking raters and responses to improve recommendations and market research.

Link: Here is a page from Amazon that describes similar functions, the “Customers Compare” feature:

A recent Springwise newsletter described Perkler, a website that helps people (primarily Australians, given that it’s an Aussie company) manage their perks, loyalty reward card offerings, credit card offers, and even some potentially redeemable rewards (such as cashing in airline miles for some sort of gift certificate).

It’s an interesting application of an idea I had many years ago. I thought that it would make sense to take all of this same loyalty information and encode it in/tie it to a single uber-reward card. Either a standalone card or tied to a suitable credit card, e.g., American Express, the card when swiped or scanned would trigger access to a database that would query for the best possible reward given both your available options and a set of preferences you have set. For example, some people would prefer to maximize dollar value of rewards while others prefer dealing only in one “currency,” such as airline miles.

A similar concept to the “one card to rule them all” is the all-in-one discount card DIY tool [Ed. Added link via lifehacker.com]. This allows you to create a single wallet-sized card with several sets of barcodes/numbers on it to save space in the wallet/checkbook. I think it certainly beats putting all those tags on a keychain like some people do.

In any event, the issues with implementing the OneRewardCard are tied to privacy, database construction, and vendor incentives.

On the privacy front, I’m one of those people who uses basically a single credit card for everything (bad long-term budgeting as I was leaving the Army and heading to law school taught me some credit lessons that boil down to “don’t spend what you haven’t got – ever, except for houses and education”). AmEx already knows where I shop and quite possibly what I buy (I don’t know how much line-item detail gets sent upstream through the authorization process or whether it varies according to vendor). I wouldn’t be particularly concerned about them getting extra information, and they could certainly enhance privacy as an offering for interested consumers.

Database construction is the issue of getting up-to-date rewards information into the database so people can get relevant offers and choose accordingly. The current example of what this problem looks like without vendor involvement is the plethora of deal/coupon websites that track many old/expired/inappropriate discount or coupon codes. At one point, I resolved to search for discount codes anytime I used a new ecommerce website, particularly one I hadn’t been receiving offers for. After searching for coupon codes, I got fed up pretty quickly with the inability of Google to parse those various sites (and the carbon copy/leech versions that abound as well) and the inherent difficulty for the sites themselves to have a comprehensive listing of up-to-date relevant offers. Human involvement or AI searching/screening are two answers, but bringing vendors inside the circle of trust is another.

Vendor involvement depends on the value proposition for a vendor in offering a discount. For example, a vendor seeking to reward customers with a special discount for past loyalty will not want to share that discount with new customers who haven’t “paid their dues.” Similarly, a vendor seeking to attract new customers would prefer not to give discounts to people who would buy anyways at the normal price. On top of that, the actual number of redemptions of an offer might rise dramatically, for which marketers/sales teams would have to adjust. My suspicion is that the initial thoughts of vendors will be that this program would weaken their connection to the customer since the element of knowledge of the origin of the discount is dramatically weaker — if I get a discount on flowers under the OneCard paradigm, I don’t necessarily automatically learn that the discount came from my USAA membership or my Platinum card or from my Allegheny College alumni status. I don’t believe that this is an insurmountable problem, just one that has to be thought out. (Quick idea: the OneCard could in fact be a smartphone app that would give proper credit to the right vendor or channel partner.) The real underlying goal of vendor involvement from the consumer perspective is getting the fullest set of offers available. It might well be that in exchange for better targeting data, and the possibility of point-of-search (a la perkler) or -sale impact, the net redeemed value of perks would rise.

There’s a business here that I just don’t have the contacts, time, energy, or money to pursue. Good luck to someone; I’d like to be on your board.

The title of this post links to the page pinged by a Facebook badge I just created. I’m considering adding these to our contact pages (http://www.imetrick.com/ and http://www.imetmikeprinci.com/). Are these useful to anyone? I’m not sure — I think it depends greatly on whether you have a social networking strategy (even if that strategy is just keeping in touch with more people). This is what it looks like as an image:

It seems to me that people are still missing a little bit of the secret sauce in the use and interplay between social networking sites and the parts of the web that live outside these sites. I suppose that someone could do all their blogging, picture posting, and everything inside facebook, which would probably make some sense to facebook, but it doesn’t work for most people I know. They’ve already done blogs of their own (I work on three right now as it is) and compartmentalize their lives a bit more than any of these sites currently allow.

For example, the original sixdegrees.com site (IIRC) more explicitly recognized that there is a difference in depth and closeness of the relationship that doesn’t really affect whether you want to hear about the person or be in some level of contact. But there is a difference between family members, close friends, friends of friends, and business colleagues and former colleagues. Why should facebook treat them all the same?

People I worked with on deals a few years ago may be great people and very friendly, and some level of relationship is welcome to us both. But I imagine that facebook’s faux-friend feed filter doesn’t really do the job as well as it could. Why not interpolate an algorithm that measures how closely you relate to the person? Spoke did a similar thing early on (back when its graphical depictions and interface dramatically overwhelmed its peers, and it still beats anything that you see today).

Speaking of early generation tools, why doesn’t facebook take over the function that planetall.com provided, that of universally updating first-person contact information and spreading it? That would put Plaxo out of business in probably a week, which would not only be payback for all those spammy messages they used to send but personally please me because they send me messages but don’t recognize my email address when I try to unsubscribe or register or find a lost password!

TIP: unless your internal system is really bulletproof, it is not brand dilution to outsource mailing list management to a quality third party. There are several companies whose footers I don’t mind seeing on mailing list emails. Knowing that I can more easily unsubscribe makes me more willing to put up with a marginally useful email rather than putting me over the edge and making me decide to unsubscribe now.

QUESTION: how many of you actually unsubscribe from mailing lists rather than just hit spam? I’ve tried on multiple occasions to unsubscribe from the Palm newsletter that goes to one of my gmail accounts, but it keeps coming back. Now, it’s spam. Does Palm know (or care, which is a different problem, meaning that it really is spam) how many of its emails are spam? Doesn’t that dilute marketing effectiveness and send the wrong signals to the sales force?

WANTED: developer interested in social networks and visualization to collaborate on graphical interface tools that help people manage social networks in a realistic degrees-style method rather than an unrealistic, 1990’s flat-file list of friends. I’ve got ideas and there are precedents that can be improved on.

After reading this post on Springwise (a site/feed I enjoy very much), I realized that I needed to post another orphaned idea.

People have seen a number of “prepared food” offerings, where a company delivers a bunch of meals to you or your family that are designed (usually) to control portions and assist in weight-loss.

The story on leViv is different because the company takes a slightly different take, focusing on specific health “issues” and producing five separate programs, one for each.

At one spot, the company makes a reference to “evidence-based recommendations,” which almost makes me think that this idea is close to being adopted.

The idea that I had, building off of 23andme’s stated goal of continuously improving their product by reference to the evolving scientific literature connecting SNPs and other genetic sequences to specific diseases or other traits, was to develop a private chef company (what I called these prepared food delivery companies in the past) that would take a similar approach by integrating nutritional research into changing and updated recipes targeted to specific client attributes. So, a study that says 1/3 cup of blueberries a week reduces heart disease risk for 40 year-old male nonsmokers means that I would get a slightly different menu. The integration of the two businesses, genetic information about potential predilections for certain diseases along with nutrition guidelines related to those risks, would lead to perhaps not genomic medicine but almost certainly to genomic nutrition.

After all, there are very few nutrition studies that talk about taking in large amounts of dangerous things like fat and sugar, so it’s probably a riskless improvement to diet planning that can only help prevent possible medical problems.

Clearly, the more individualized the assessment and menu, the more complicated this would be. However, the true private chef could use this sort of information to create an optimized shopping list and menu for a family to serve as the palette on which to base his or her creations.

I’d be delighted to hear from the folks at leViv about their reaction to my idea, and even more delighted to read more about how they are actually constructing menus for their five plans.

In this article on lawyer/presidents (or president/lawyers, if you prefer), the WSJ‘s Law Blog notes that William McKinley, the 25th President, attended Allegheny College (“briefly attended,” according to this biography) and “for one term” according to his Wikipedia entry.

So, if we’re grading on a curve, I’ve managed to graduate from Allegheny and from a law school. Now for that president thing….

Wanted: a work-for-hire (so it can be released under a CC license for non-commercial use, exact license TBD) software applet, either for an iPhone or for a Fujitsu laptop (running Vista).

Feature: uses internal accelerometer(s), shock sensor, or similar functions at the hardware level as input for output that describes the motion of the phone/laptop in terms of Richter scale (yes, the earthquake Richter scale).

Reference: BLDGBLOG: Earthquakes in the Sky is the post that got me thinking about this. Many thanks to BLDGBLOG, which should be recognized in some way, perhaps with a persistent link in the credits.

Reward: $50 for first working version. Submissions to tsmember@gmail.com. I will be able to test the laptop version myself and will have to distribute the iPhone version to a colleague. All submissions will be recognized here.

I read somewhere (here’s one reference and one that makes it both positive and negative, and another – any other favorites?) of someone referring to the not-so-casual, i.e., intentional, dropping of a reference that one went to Harvard as an “H-bomb.” (Not this H-bomb.)

Why don’t recommendation systems create, or allow for, a way to post recommendations that respects poster privacy? For example, I may want to post something about a doctor that I use but not want to reveal my true name or information that reveals too much about me — say, an indication that I have some particular health problem.

Yes, there is a tension between anonymity and usefulness/veracity of recommendations, but that can be dealt with separately; it explains why this could be an option for some posters.

I recently came across this quote and have been upset about not getting it posted sooner. It just oozes character.

An excess of parental attention may build self-esteem, which is useless, at the expense of self-reliance, which is gold.

Hugh O’Neill in “The Seven Dadly Sins” in Best Life magazine, April 2008, p. 81.

I think that trying to explain what is, at its heart, a clear and simple expression of Emerson’s philosophy would ruin it.

I will however note that the lesson holds true for employees as well as children. We have seen, but not critically evaluated, numerous articles that reference Gen Y as being very demanding for affirmation and opportunity, often without responsibility or performance. Maybe this explains it.

I like the Unclutterer blog because it’s short and to the point, reducing clutter in its posts as well as your life. This article describes the author’s approach to removing food clutter, in the form of things he’s decided not to eat that still live in his pantry.

I have a different problem: we’re forever throwing away leftovers not because we chose not to eat them, but because they migrated to the back of the fridge or underneath a slice of pizza and went out of sight, out of mind. The few solutions that I’ve come up with all have drawbacks:

Eat everything — I’m already a bit heavier than my post-Ranger School marathon weight, and I see no need to add to that problem in solving this one.

Throw it away first — my mother was one of the starving kids in China moms, and it still lives with me. All this would do, of course, is eliminate the guilt I feel when throwing stuff out after believing that I was going to eat it.

Buy a 6-inch deep refrigerator — my theory is that if there’s no space back there, stuff can’t hide or be hidden. But we otherwise like our fridge and don’t have the 20+ feet of wall space that would be required to install this mythical fridge.

What we have done so far is move to clear colorless containers for more food, so that every time it opens, we are more obviously reminded of what’s hanging around for a second chance.

What do you do to avoid the forgotten leftover tragedy? Please put your thoughts in a comment, and I’ll report on my test of the ideas that seem the best for us.